For the record, it is 24th in the world:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...
And there are other French cities above it: Levallois-Perret is 8th at 26,432/km^2.
* https://smartdensity.com/mid-rise-buildings-that-work-the-pr...
The giant vacant housing inventories have not gone down much over the years. Cheap housing sells well, but giant mansion apartments that got trendy at around 2012-2015 are really unsellable, and there were really a lot of them built in urban centres.
Believe me or not, Shanghai has few places with 10 years old "brand new" apartments.
Getting any place within ten minutes taxi ride of a metro occupied is easy. Might be hard to sell it but you can rent it easy.
See a bit what Le Corbusier was doing with its "Unité d'habitation": A large building that also included amenities and a park around it.
Edit in response to Barry below: Whatever Le Corbusier's faults, "Unité d'habitation" [1] was indeed designed to be pleasant and liveable, and including a school (originally) and a floor for shops and amenities.
Le Corbusier’s ideal city was something like Brasilia, which he designed. Hostile to pedestrians, made for motorists, with no mixed use spaces anywhere, with residential, commercial and industrial spaces completely separated.
If they can pull this off – awesome.
A perfect dense city looks like Brooklyn, Harlem or Paris, not like Pudong.
In the last few years, CPC aims to equalize urbanization growth and have set internal migration to limit tier1 cities growth.
However in reality, major Chinese cities are less dense than comparable tier1 cities elsewhere. Major urban centres density in particular have decreased 20% in the last 10 years. I believe this accounts for the substantial number of shadow migrants. Minor Chinese cities are much more dense than comparable cities elsewhere.
Apparently traffic planning is done by the military in major cities, there's a conspicuous absence of one way streets and other planning blunders leading to congestion. I'm not sure if it's blunders or prioritization different goals, after all regardless of who plans, there are competent traffic engineers working at the highest level. China's airspace is also largely planned by the military and constrained to extremely narrow flight corridors leading to all sorts of inefficiencies and widespread delay. Hence popularity of high speed rail. Regardless there's still a lot of urban optimizations to be made. He is one of the few that thinks large Chinese cities should be larger.
It would be interesting to see how China implements these new urban policies with constraints of existing urban development. Wonder if they'll run into the same development woes as other large cities. On the other hand Chinese superblocks are sufficiently large and dense that they should easily sustain mix-use revitalization. Selfishly just waiting for some movement on arcologies.
Current policy is to urbanize the western regions to reduce regional imbalances.
This portrays the city as only a residential entity with residential amenities. Where are the productive uses of land, such as factories, refineries, shipyards, office buildings, warehouses, food markets, etc. that are needed for a thriving economy. "Mixed use" should account for placing places of employment in proximity to residential areas so that transportation costs and time consumed by commuting are reduced.
Or are cities to be exclusively centers of consumption?
Not surprising at all, but I didn't know what they mentioned next:
>Although China [...] is working to build over 7,000km of new subway lines in cities across the country by 2020
As somebody living in the U.S. this has me absolutely floored. I'm feeling some extreme transit envy.
